Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation – I have a few comments.
From the engaging others post:
The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn’t it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.
From the curation post:
Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren’t following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.
These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to “party” and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!
Andy,
I think the software that does this well is the software I used when I first got on the Internet, before the World Wide Web. It was mailing list software. Each mailing list is limited to a particular topic of interest. Everyone on the list is happy to contribute what they’ve learned on that topic. The mailing list I subscribed to was about ham radio DXing, that is contacting hams far away, all over the world.
Since then a very successful ham radio company, Elecraft, uses mailing list software to provide excellent support to the users of the radios it designs and sells. The two owners follow the activity on the list every day and quickly supply correct answers about how to use their radios and correct details about the software in their radios. It has helped to expand their business a great deal. The users get answers directly from the engineers who designed and built the radios. It is a very simple solution, but extremely powerful as well!
Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses “standing searches” for a topic or phrase,…